Exposed: HiTechnic Tetrix Controllers

This Exposed episode is brought to you by Team R.A.B.B.I. My first thought when opening the envelope from them was “Oh wow, thanks!” My second thought was “I wonder what these look like on the inside.” It must’ve taken a lot of restraint but I managed to not open them until at least an hour later. They did not disappoint. These things look great on the inside!

The servo controller

The DC motor controller

As you can see from the pictures, these have quite a number of components on them. The servo controller is not as exciting looking as the DC motor controller, though. You can see two really beefy motor controlling chips on the right one and a smaller microcontroller just to the right of them. I checked on the bottom of the PCBs but there are nothing but a couple of traces there. The servo controller has the 6 servo connectors to the bottom left. The motor controller has the motor terminals on the left, the encoder connectors and then the power terminals.

So now that I’ve seen them on the inside, I am going to have to see them actually work! More on that at a later date.

About Xander

Xander Soldaat is a Software Engineer and former Infrastructure Architect. He loves building and programming robots. He recently had the opportunity to turn his robotics hobby into his profession and has started working for Robomatter, the makers of ROBOTC and Robot Virtual Words.

Hi Rich,
I fixed the link in your message to the URL it was ultimately pointing to. I have never made them work with an Arduino or Pi but I see no reason why it wouldn’t work. I2C is a simple protocol. Just make sure you don’t exceed the ~10KHz clock speed or it may not work well.